I wasn’t always like this…

Since childhood I have always loved organizing. I remember being up late at night in a hyper-focused state, tip-toeing around my bedroom, hoping my mom would not hear me moving furniture around and rearranging items in my desk drawers, so that everything fit neatly in place. But I have a confession… I have not always been someone who has found it easy to stay organized most of the time, and am definitely not what I would call a naturally “uncluttered” person.

Antique Row in Kensington, MD. Image courtesy of ExploreKensington.com

Quite the contrary, I grew up with what decluttering experts call a high “clutter threshold” in a charming Victorian-era house in the quaint Washington D.C. suburb of Kensington, Maryland. It’s well known amongst treasure hunters for its Antique Row and on the weekends, my parents, who were inspired by their late 1800s home, often spent their weekends taking me along with them in their antiquing excursions to furnish and decorate according to their many tastes. We spent hours chit-chatting with shopkeepers, learning the history of their pieces which ran the gamut of small tchotchkes, lamps, and wall hangings, to large furniture. My parent’s inclination towards eclecticism did not stop there - we also frequented local markets and seasonal craft fairs for one-of-a-kind items.

And so the activity of “collecting” became somewhat of a hobby - whenever we went to a museum (which growing up near D.C. was often) or park visitor center, the gift shop became a favorite experience for me. An only child, I benefitted from my parent’s gift-giving love language and along with instilling in me my love for travel and exploring through their own adventures and sometimes taking me with them, “trip gifts” became a way to show me they missed me or for me to remember the places we had been.

So what does this all have to do with how I became a declutter coach and professional organizer? 

Being a naturally multi-passionate and curious person who is attracted to variety in things, experiences, and people, I’m so grateful that the way my parents nurtured me had an impact on my tastes in fashion, art, and home interiors. Formulaic and cookie cutter design is not something I have as much an eye for, and over the years I continued building my “collections” throughout college and my young professional life. To compound things, being a person who can be impulsive, especially when it came to my shopping habits, I was always buying the things that I was attracted to - whatever their style - simply because they were beautiful, cute, aesthetically pleasing, or useful to me in some way or the other, but without knowing what purpose they would serve or having a plan for where they would ultimately fit into my home.

Without a purpose, I was simply procuring clutter, rather than curating my home. Being someone who can get overstimulated, when things felt disorganized I would simply do what I had always done as a child - I organized and rearranged. Quite the sentimental person, I would keep most of what I owned as I accumulated new items. Watch a home organization show or read any magazine with advice on organizing and you’ll hear it - before you organize, declutter. Donate, sell, or throw away anything that you don’t need or want anymore - any home organizer will tell you this, but up to this point, I saw myself as someone who loved organizing… so it didn’t matter that I had a lot of stuff!

But even when things were organized, shelves and drawers were stuffed to the brim in volume and surface area. Keeping things clean and tidy was becoming unbearable, if not impossible, because what I had viewed as “space optimization” made it difficult to put things away. It was a never-ending game of tetris in drawers, shelves, and bins to take things out and put them away. And as for getting dressed, my closet was like a constant wrestling battle between me and my clothing, and it was my clothing who was winning. I was in a constant state of reorganizing and buying new organizing products to reorganize again. I don’t know that this cycle was ever sustainable - but at some point it became something that I no longer wanted to spend time on.

I knew something had to change. I did not want all the different styles in my home to feel incongruent. I wanted things to be easy to put away so that I was someone who was able to keep things organized and in their place 80% of the time. I wanted to be a person who actually remembered where things were, rather than a person who looked in five different places because things had been reorganized so many times. And, I wanted to be a person who had easy access to things I needed and loved without taking on an entire organizing project when I needed them.

Marie Kondo’s book, “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up”

“Storage experts are hoarders.” The words, towards the beginning of Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” hit me like a pound of bricks. Somewhere or the other I’d heard about a new approach to decluttering - it was a book written by a Japanese organizing guru and being a #1 NYT Bestseller, I kept hearing about it.

Her method was based on decluttering with joy. And at this point in my life “decluttering” and “joy” were not two words that belonged in the same sentence. Because: 1. Decluttering was not fun. 2. Why would I get rid of things that I loved, which at the time I perceived was everything that I owned?

But as previously mentioned, I knew something had to change, and as skeptical as I was, I was attracted to the idea of using joy as an approach. I was traveling out-of-state for work and was away from home Monday through Thursday every week. I couldn’t spend my precious weekend on home organizing activities when what I wanted to do most was spend time with family and friends.

“Storage experts are hoarders…I too was once captivated by the storage myth… Putting things away creates the illusion that the clutter problem had been solved. But sooner or later…the room once overflows again with things, and some new and ‘easy’ storage method becomes necessary, creating a negative spiral.”

The spiral Marie described was the spiral I was in. There, in that moment, Marie Kondo was able to use her empathy of having been before where I was to convince me of something I had heard before but never believed - to declutter and discard first before organizing. So I continued reading on and I learned how to truly declutter by discarding things that did not “spark joy” for me. The joy-based approach had me hooked and by reframing things around what to keep, Marie made things click - by only keeping things that brought me joy at this moment in my life and discarding/donating the rest, I was now able to easily access and take care of the things that I had so carefully selected to keep any time I wanted. I was able to put things away more easily and found it easier to keep things tidy.

But the real benefit was a lifestyle where I was living the way I wanted and was confident that what sparked joy for me today was supporting that lifestyle. This joy-based approach was addicting and I started applying it to other things in my life, including how I spent my time personally and professionally. In my life, one of the things that has given me the most joy has been 1-on-1 coaching, whether it was giving back to my alma maters through mentorship programs or taking an active role in personal development when managing people on my teams.

This is why I founded The Joy Trainer. It combines my passion for tidying and organizing (and newfound love of decluttering with joy!) with my love of coaching. While I do not like to throw around the word “hoarder,” lightly, as hoarding and hoarding behavior are mental health conditions, I’ve certainly seen the same pattern myself and Marie experienced of what I’ll call “organized accumulation” with my clients. They have hit a point where they need a new approach beyond organizing and someone who can guide them through deciding to keep with the lens of joy and the life they want to live. Now I get to spend my time with clients helping them transform spaces that they previously used for storage, into spaces where they can spend and enjoy their lives.

You may be wondering about my previous habits around antiquing and my eclectic collecting habits. Of course all of that is fun and I will tell you, I am still someone who LOVES antiquing and collecting, but I am now much more confident in the things that I love the most. Now when I buy them, I know exactly what their purpose is and how they will fit into my home before I buy it. My transformation was a shift away from mindless accumulation to mindful curation. I’m still me, the same multi-passionate person with eclectic style, just with less clutter and without things that don’t spark joy!